Mind Your Language!

I've been reading quite a lot of poetry lately, boning up for World Book Night and my great giveaway of Carol Ann Duffy's book The World's Wife and reading prose as well (Carson McCullers' The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter is top of the pile beside my bed at the moment; wonderful, astringent stuff) and it seems to me that a poem, in particular, is a slight thing and sometimes the weight of language can drag it down.

I think that when you are finding your feet as a writer, developing a sense of style and exercising your vocal chords in all their nuanced variety and you start to discover that you have a facility with words, it is easy to let it go to your head.  Just because you discover that you can fire on all literary cylinders doesn't necessarily mean that you  should.  It's easy to fall in love with your own voice, but hand-in-hand with your powers of expression, you should be working on a discriminating editorial eye -- the two go together and one without the other does not a writer make.

Perhaps it's easier to think of it in terms of jewellery: the rough gemstone needs to be cut and polished in order to maximise the play of light, but if you then go and put it in an incredibly elaborate setting, you run the risk of dettracting from the jewel itself.

I think it's the same was writing.  Don't settle yourself at your computer with the idea of producing beautiful, poetic work, be it poetry or prose; write to express your thoughts and ideas with all the clarity that you can muster.  Don't be tempted to sacrifice content for style -- in other words, mind you language.